I just received the alert today about the "upgrade", so my apologies for the late contribution.
XenForo seems to be taking over discussion forums across the internet, and unfortunately it seems to go hand-in-hand with the site getting sold. There are two companies competing with each other to buy up every site out there, so I hope that doesn't happen here.
One of the reasons that vBulletin has lasted so long has been the intuitive nature it uses in its presentation. As Ed mentioned here, XenForo will present a site as "here's the most recent/popular" things today, instead of how we're used to things, which is "here's the site broken down by categories/sub-categories", which I'm pretty sure is the way most people here would like to see it, forever. Even though we're from a lot of different levels of knowledge and experience, we're all people of a technical mindset, so if this place turns out the way a lot of XF conversions go, there's going to be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The most monstrous of all the changes are in the look-and-feel category, namely tons of whitespace added to make the site look like its being viewed on an app. I've seen some sites where there is so much white space that each page view is like staring at a fluorescent lamp. It also makes it difficult to follow along with discussions because there's less thread info on each page, to make room for more whitespace.
Agreed. In fact I could never figure out why vBulletin offers Google search, when the built-in search works so well (if the proper software flags are set).
Xenforo, out of the box, is one of the worst things I've seen for forums. If its configured the right way it can have a lot of the look feel of a proper vBulletin site, and I hope it goes that way. I get a lot more done, and faster, when using vBulletin.
NO.
On vBulletin, likes are not a problem. Its a way of publicly thanking people for their help.
Have you ever seen the 'like' system on Xenforo? Its really part of a badging system, and it appears to have been designed by members of a public school board. Badges are given for threads browsed, numbers of posts, numbers of likes, days passed since registration, and a long list of other things even more vacuous. I'm a member of one site that pushes every one of those options, because it "helps develop the community". After the first two dozen alerts I finally trudged through all the settings and found out how to turn all the notifications and badge displays off.
Maybe its possible to tone the system down so we can truly have a "thanks" button and thats ALL, but if not, then your research here and your postings are going to turn into a participation trophy awarded almost daily. Its infantile.
XenForo seems to be taking over discussion forums across the internet, and unfortunately it seems to go hand-in-hand with the site getting sold. There are two companies competing with each other to buy up every site out there, so I hope that doesn't happen here.
The New Age sites, which act more like stand alone applications, rather than rich text with graphics, are far less intuitive than their predecessors.
My impression has been consistently that a gigantic effort is being made to make the Internet accessible to the masses by presenting it the way their mind works. However, in the process, those who are logically capable, are finding it more difficult to use what they have been using since its beginning.
For instance, why have logically hierachical menu systems been replaced by users' frequency of use? Why has text been replaced by glyphs in buttons and menus? What is wrong with using the English Language?
One of the reasons that vBulletin has lasted so long has been the intuitive nature it uses in its presentation. As Ed mentioned here, XenForo will present a site as "here's the most recent/popular" things today, instead of how we're used to things, which is "here's the site broken down by categories/sub-categories", which I'm pretty sure is the way most people here would like to see it, forever. Even though we're from a lot of different levels of knowledge and experience, we're all people of a technical mindset, so if this place turns out the way a lot of XF conversions go, there's going to be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The most monstrous of all the changes are in the look-and-feel category, namely tons of whitespace added to make the site look like its being viewed on an app. I've seen some sites where there is so much white space that each page view is like staring at a fluorescent lamp. It also makes it difficult to follow along with discussions because there's less thread info on each page, to make room for more whitespace.
One of the things I've seen in some XenForo installations is a missing "search in thread" function. This is one of the most useful search functions, but is apparently not installed by default in XenForo. Specifics are described in this XenForo thread. For instance, AVS does not properly provide this functionality, but ASR does. It would be really good to have it, as the current vBulletin software does a very good job providing this functionality.
Agreed. In fact I could never figure out why vBulletin offers Google search, when the built-in search works so well (if the proper software flags are set).
We are still using good old software.
The new one will smack you in the face, and in the brain.
It will take more clicks to do the same task. I hope not
The current software is not ‘good’ in terms of feature support, updates and security sadly. It was abandoned many years ago.
I’m not sure if you’ve used the developers’ replacement XenForo, but nothing takes more work in my experience. Quite the opposite, in fact. It loads faster, works far better on mobile devices, handles copy & paste of images directly into the text box, supports live preview of formatting, handles notifications for subscribed or updated threads way better - quicker to see and read those, from a single drop-down menu.
I’d rather it was done yesterday, especially when using my phone to browse, to be honest
Xenforo, out of the box, is one of the worst things I've seen for forums. If its configured the right way it can have a lot of the look feel of a proper vBulletin site, and I hope it goes that way. I get a lot more done, and faster, when using vBulletin.
Maybe a like function on posts. Have seen this on other tech forums.
NO.
On vBulletin, likes are not a problem. Its a way of publicly thanking people for their help.
Have you ever seen the 'like' system on Xenforo? Its really part of a badging system, and it appears to have been designed by members of a public school board. Badges are given for threads browsed, numbers of posts, numbers of likes, days passed since registration, and a long list of other things even more vacuous. I'm a member of one site that pushes every one of those options, because it "helps develop the community". After the first two dozen alerts I finally trudged through all the settings and found out how to turn all the notifications and badge displays off.
Maybe its possible to tone the system down so we can truly have a "thanks" button and thats ALL, but if not, then your research here and your postings are going to turn into a participation trophy awarded almost daily. Its infantile.